They function exactly the same way.
I've been using my PC as a console since June - I remember it well because I got rid of my desk the day Wreckfest came out - and while it's definitely usable, it's a stretch to say they function the exact same way.
If you play the same game side-by-side on PS4 and PC you won't see a difference (if anything the PC version will run better, hardware permitting) and they'll be exactly the same gameplay-wise. While that
is great, that's also why it's been that long since I played a game built for PC - they're hit-and-miss, mostly the latter. Meanwhile, any game you can buy on any console is guaranteed to work with the hardware
and software, you can't say the same for PC, there will always be games that literally can't work with your combination of hardware, software, settings, etc. because there are infinite combinations thereof and thousands of games on Steam (and even more not on Steam).
Then there are the issues I had with Big Picture Mode that prompted me to give up and go back to desktop mode with a wireless keyboard, but those could be subjective and also the result of my own system not working properly, although I don't think so. For instance, I'm not sure if it's still the case but BPM wouldn't let me talk to my Steam friends for at least a month after the big chat update and instead told me to use desktop mode. I've also seen games fail to launch and instead show the BPM background and the web browser frequently inexplicably won't let me use the cursor until I do something specific, but I've forgotten what that is (maybe press the right stick in?).
I'll admit I mis-wrote what I meant and had intended to say that PCs
were a properly awful console experience until Valve started working on improving it but they still can't compete with consoles. They may be usable, but they're not actually
good compared to a true console
, that's what I'm saying, and the thing is SMS's console likely won't be using Steam so they'll need to circumvent these issues all over again. That means either locking the console down to a single storefront with certified games that are guaranteed to work with their hardware (including whatever controller it'll come with), or letting people install whatever and somehow dealing with the fallout of that, as Valve has tried to do with BPM and their universal controller support.
